4/13/2010 @ 5:15PM

Why Women Are Freezing Their Eggs

Some game-changing fertility technology is promising to let your baby-bearing clock tick well past the witching hour. Extend Fertility Centers, an egg-harvesting, freezing and storage company, can’t put an infant in your crib, but it promises to keep your eggs safe until pregnancy becomes an option. An ambitious young businesswoman can now jockey for the corner suite while putting her future family on ice.

We spoke with a financial-services executive we’ll call Hillary, to conceal her identity, about her decision two years ago, at 39, to have her eggs harvested and stored at an Extend Facility center. She learned about the egg-freezing technology through an obstetrician friend and used $20,000 of her Wall Street bonus to go through two cycles of the procedure. She now has more than 20 eggs at the ready for use when the time is right. “You’re 23, and you look at the managing director who’s 40 and has no kids,” says Hillary. “And you’re, like, oh, she’s thrown it all away. Well, it’s not the case, reproductive technology being what it is. Totally not the case.”

According to The Fertility Sourcebook, a woman’s chance of conceiving drops with each passing decade. A healthy 20-something has an 87% chance of getting pregnant over the course of a year, compared to 52% for a 35-year-old. But in vitro fertilization now allows women to conceive more easily at older ages. According to data collected by the NYU fertility center, at 30, women who had IVF had a 62% delivery rate. At 40, with IVF, the rate drops to 28% and by age 42 it drops to 14%.

The rates in the study demonstrate the relative decline in fertility as a function of age, so egg freezing can provide some peace of mind for a a woman who is going to delay childbearing. “We’ve seen a progressive increase in the number of women choosing to freeze their eggs, and part of it because we now have data and an awareness of its relative success, says Dr. Jamie Grifo, program director of the NYU Fertility Center.

The procedure is also appealing to women who want to focus on their career without sacrificing the option of having a child. It’s a disruptive technology that levels that playing field between men and women and it allows them to get on with their career. This is not a guarantee but an insurance policy. We can give you a better chance to have the family that you want, he adds.

More than 1,000 babies have been born worldwide from implanted frozen eggs. Extend Fertility claims that 14 of those babies were born to women who had participated in the company’s multi-clinic frozen egg study. Extend Fertility is the only company that offers egg freezing on a national basis through its affiliated clinics in New York City, Beverly Hills, Boston, Seattle and Austin. The company’s medical advisory board recommends that women freeze their eggs before age 35, and not past the age of 40, although women over 40 are evaluated on an individual basis.

It’s also important to note that in addition to age limits, there are pre-cycle tests required for any woman seeking IVF treatment, including Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) tests and transvaginal ultrasounds (this analyzes the health of the eggs in the ovaries and helps determines if the follicles are responding to the hormones).These tests help determine if a woman is a good candidate for IVF, regardless of her age. Sadly, some women aren’t able to produce enough eggs to make the process worth the financial cost.

The treatment cycle to retrieve eggs for freezing is the same as that for in vitro fertilization: an orientation session, a birth control regimen, ultrasounds, self-administered injections, in-clinic monitoring that culminate in the egg-retrieval process.

In order to collect the eggs, doctors use a transvaginal ultrasound to locate the eggs and then remove them by inserting a needle in the ovaries through the vaginal wall. Women undergoing the procedure are sedated and usually experience little discomfort. The procedure lasts about 30 minutes and most women return to work the next day.

More than 350 women have frozen eggs in the partner facilities of Extend Fertility, which charges $400 a year for storage. However, it should be noted that there are no guarantees that these eggs will result in live births. The procedure is still considered experimental and is not covered by health insurance.

Now that Hillary’s invested in her future babies, she might want to consider adding her new fertility status to her profile on Match.com.